8 Days of Christmas: Coinbase Adds Crypto-to-Crypto Trading

San Francisco-based cryptocurrency exchange and wallet service Coinbase has launched its new “Convert” service as a part of their “12 Days of Coinbase” mission, imagined to help people and their clients all over the world.

Photo: The Coinbase Blog

Coinbase said they believe it’s important that they build features that let people take advantage of the unique attributes of cryptocurrency. That’s why they’ve decided to roll out a new feature called Convert, which customers can use to convert one cryptocurrency into another.

“We’ll be gradually rolling out the ability to convert cryptocurrencies to customers in all 34 countries in which Coinbase offers native payment access. We’ll gather customer feedback along the way and continue to iterate on the feature over time. Our product teams are thinking deeply about new ways to democratize the best of cryptocurrency, and the ability to easily convert one asset to another is an important step on this path.”

Coinbase product manager Anna Marie Clifton said that the company is adding support for crypto-to-crypto trading for its retail customers including a feature that has long been available to professional cryptocurrency trading services.

She said that while trading pairs are “a pretty common paradigm in the crypto trading space,” they are not currently being served well to the broader retail audience.

“The functionality is giving customers the ability to directly convert between one cryptocurrency and another, which is pretty advanced. The trading pairs were developed based on user feedback.”

Clifton added that some customers have purchased bitcoin but now want to interact with decentralized applications (dapps), and therefore need to convert their holdings.

She explains:

“I think one of the things that was most surprising was seeing a lot of customers frustrated because they wanted to use the product immediately but it required two trading fees.”

When Coinbase was founded, the only products that connected wallets to the Bitcoin blockchain were technical and complex. They set out to build an easy-to-use, highly secure, and trusted experience for anyone to buy or sell Bitcoin. By focusing on ease of use, and designing for simplicity, they’ve tried to make crypto more accessible to everyone.

“This latest feature that allows customers to convert from one crypto directly into another is a natural progression of this journey.”

Since Dec. 10, Coinbase has been rolling out new offerings as part of its “12 Days of Coinbase” promotional campaign named in reference to a traditional Christmas song.

We already wrote about how for the 5th day of Christmas, Coinbase decided to greet it’s U.S. customers with the possibility to instantly withdraw Coinbase balances to PayPal, providing even faster access to their funds through one of the world’s easiest and most widely-used payment platforms. These withdrawals are not only fast; they’re free and incur no fees.

PayPal offers U.S. customers an alternative. Before today, you needed an ACH or Federal Wire account to withdraw funds. These traditional finance networks can add up to two business days to a withdrawal.

On Monday, Coinbase also announced that they have changed their traditional listing strategy and adopted a new customer-focused method. The company aims at emulating the stock market in providing many investment options. Dan Romero, Vice President of Coinbase, explained that they are examining several tokens in the market to enhance support for various new crypto assets. The move is significant in contrast to Coinbase’s long known careful approach to supporting individual tokens.

Another announcement from the 12 days of Coinbase program is the acceptance of Circle’s USDC stablecoin. Circle is a Boston-based cryptocurrency finance firm that developed a stable cryptocurrency that’s pegged 1:1 to the US dollar (USD).

Coinbase’s professional exchange platform Coinbase Pro is the 20th largest exchange by 24-hour trade volume, according to CoinMarketCap, at $154 million.

We welcome comments that advance the story directly or with relevant tangential information.
We try to block comments that use offensive language, all capital letters or appear to be spam,
and we review comments frequently to ensure they meet our standards.
Views expressed in the comments do not represent those of Coinspeaker Ltd.